


Flight

by RiverTam



Series: The Black Fox and the Bloodhound [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Getting Together, HYDRA Husbands, M/M, On the Run, Retrograde Amnesia, implied/referenced past trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-04
Updated: 2019-11-04
Packaged: 2021-01-22 17:02:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21305501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RiverTam/pseuds/RiverTam
Summary: Talks happen.  Coming clean happens.And then everything goes FUBAR.Beta read by the awesomePaint_Stained_Heart
Relationships: Jack Rollins & Brock Rumlow, Jack Rollins/Brock Rumlow
Series: The Black Fox and the Bloodhound [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1494413
Comments: 4
Kudos: 27





	Flight

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:**  
\- Discussion of past traumas including loss of a loved one, mission failure at the cost of lives, and serious injury  
\- References to body bags and serious injuries  
\- Unexpectedly fleeing one's home in the middle of the night

When Jack said ‘apartment,’ Brock wasn’t exactly expecting to walk up to a duplex on a quiet side street. Any doubt that they were in the right place, however, evaporated as soon as he saw the dull, oxidized paint of Jack’s Chevy parked in the driveway.

“Who’s in the other unit?”

“Some family with kids,” Jack answered as he dug in his pocket for his keys. “I rent it to them below market rate. They watch the cats when I’m on duty and don’t ask questions about why or where I disappear to when we deploy.”

Brock eyed the exposed brick making up the lower third of the exterior walls and then looked back at Jack. “You’ve had this place a while.”

Pausing with his hand on the doorknob, Jack took a breath and nodded. He pushed the door open, then stepped inside. “Bought it as soon as my post on STRIKE was official.” Leaning down, he loosened the laces of his boots and toed them off, setting them neatly under a small bench in the entryway.

Doing the same with his own shoes, Brock looked around at the unexpected glimpse into Jack’s private life. The private life that, apparently, they used to share. As he followed Jack further in, he couldn’t help but crane his neck to look around.

The ceilings were vaulted, taken all the way up to the roof with exposed beams and hanging lights that flickered to life when Jack hit a switch on the wall. Most of the walls were the same exposed brick as the outside, lending warmth to the open-plan layout. The furniture was tastefully modern but well-loved; the armchair under the south-facing window almost had more cat fur on it than the sturdy fabric from which it was made.

The subtle arrangement of everything in the apartment to keep sightlines open and offer cover in case of an intrusion wasn’t accidental. Brock wouldn’t have expected or accepted anything less.

When a small orange tabby cat swiped against his leg and then reached up to paw at his knee, Brock scooped her up and cradled her in his arm as she chirped at him. “Hey, Cricket,” he said, a little distracted as Jack’s other cat, Moose, rubbed against his leg.

“They missed you,” Jack told him with a slight smile as he leaned against the kitchen island. His arms were crossed over his chest loosely, more nervous than defensive. “You, uh… you remember their names?

Brock gave Jack a slightly puzzled smile in return. “Dude, your civvie Instagram is basically nothing but your cats, coffee, beer, and your car. And there’s pictures on the wall in your office.” When Jack’s face fell, Brock had to turn his attention back to the cat before the twist of guilt in his stomach got much worse. Cricket yawned and stretched out a front paw, batting at Brock’s jacket, her tongue-

Oh _ Jesus. _ Her _ tongue. _

“Jack,” Brock said, voice steady and calm thanks to decades of weird shit and training.

“Yeah?”

“Why do you have an alien for a housecat?”

With surprising nonchalance, Jack shrugged and turned to open the cabinet above his sink. “Saves me money on a security system, keeps her out of SHIELD’s hands, works out for both of us.”

“You have a _ flerken _ for a _ pet.” _

“Yep, noticed. Callahan’s or Black Barrel?”

Cricket chirped and snuggled deeper into the crook of Brock’s arm. “Uh. Callahan’s.”

Liquid sloshed as Jack poured them both generous glasses of the stuff. He picked up a glass in each hand and walked over to the main seating area, then sat down on the large couch with a groan.

Something struck Brock as he walked toward the couch, looking at the stairwell that led to the bedroom loft. “This place is too big for one person.”

“Debatable,” Jack answered, but the pinched look in his eyes was all Brock needed.

He stooped and sighed, frowning at his friend. Ex-husband? Something. “We bought this together, didn’t we.”

Jack nodded and wrapped both his big hands around his whiskey. “I, uh.” He cleared his throat and looked down at his drink. “It’s… difficult to come back here sometimes.”

“And you still kept the place?”

“Mickey needs a place to crash when school’s on break.” Jack’s younger brother lived on campus at Johns Hopkins, but now that Brock looked closely, he could see a few of Mickey’s things here and there through the living room.

“Masochist,” Brock muttered as he sat a respectable distance away from Jack. No sooner had he settled into place than Moose jumped up and claimed his lap. He let his own whiskey sit for a few minutes as he idly scratched at the cat’s ears. Suddenly it made more sense why Jack had volunteered for extra shifts, especially around the holidays. He’d always said something about letting the agents with families spend more time at home, but…

After a few minutes of surprisingly not-uncomfortable silence broken only by quiet purrs, Jack sat forward and put his elbows on his knees. “Libya was supposed to be formulaic, simple. Get in, extract our targets, get out. Textbook hostage rescue.”

“I remember.”

“We divided into two teams. You wouldn’t put us on the same team even though I’d had a headache-” His eyes flicked to Brock meaningfully. “-most of the day leading up to the mission. One of the ones that happens right before shit goes FUBAR.”

“I said I needed my…” Brock frowned and squeezed his eyes shut, pushing at what he now realized was a blank wall in his head where there should be memories.

“Your other half in charge of our other half,” Jack finished for him quietly. “Everything went fine until a bomb went off in the atrium, collapsing it on top of you and your team. We dug for hours.”

Any casualty count more than zero was a failure to Brock. They’d brought home six agents in body bags and another five on stretchers. Brock had been ambulatory enough that they’d let him walk from the jet to Medical, but he’d spent two weeks living in hospital scrubs and another four months in recovery for a concussion he didn’t remember having.

Jack continued, his voice rough and quiet, as he told Brock how everything had unfolded. All of the missing mission details, all of the fear and anxiety, everything. Getting their rings back from the nurse. Learning what retrograde amnesia was, and what it had done to Brock’s memory of _ them. _

Brock stayed silent through all of this, eyes boring a hole through the coffee table as he listened. Eventually Jack fell quiet, fingers woven together in what Brock knew without knowing was a way to keep his hands from shaking.

Jack was his most reliable agent, one of the top-scoring and deadliest operators in SHIELD history, a man capable of making shots that should have been impossible for anyone but the Asset. And here he was, defeat in the lines of his shoulders and raw red fatigue in his eyes as Brock asked him to relive the worst day of his life.

Jack sniffed quietly and wiped at his nose with one hand, then picked his drink back up and leaned back into the couch. “You probably got some questions,” he said, some of the Irish lilt from his childhood creeping into his voice.

And really, Brock should have figured all of this out sooner. Why did he remember cooking breakfast in the kitchen at the farmhouse in Georgia, bantering casually with Jack’s parents and cousin, but not saying their vows? Wait. _ Vows. _

“When did we get married?”

He wasn’t expecting Jack to frown, bite his lip, then mutter, “fuck’s _ sake,” _under his breath as he dug for his dog tags. Rings glinted as Jack turned them over in his palm, peering at the inscription inside one of them. “Ninth of April, 1998.” And before Brock could say anything, he added, “We got it etched on both of ‘em for this exact reason.”

“Cause we’re both shitheads who can’t even remember our own birthdays?”

That got a chuckle out of Brock. Jack pulled the chain over his head and cautiously held it out to him. “I… no pressure or anything, but…”

Brock shrugged slightly and took them, stroking his thumb over the large one that must have been Jack’s before something else caught his eye. “What’s this?” He shifted the chain’s contents around to look at a third, smaller tag of a different shape than Jack’s standard-issue SHIELD tags.

The yellowed metal was weathered and worn, the engraving almost invisible in some places, and Brock wasn’t able to see much more than O POS 1957335 before Jack quickly but gently took his tags back.

“My grandad’s,” he offered by way of explanation as he dropped his tags back under his shirt. “We’ll talk about that once you’ve had a chance to process all of this.”

Brock peered at him for several long seconds before giving up and nodding. He knew from experience that Jack was as good as an uncrackable safe when it came to information he didn’t want to give up. Thankfully, that was a good thing, in their line of work. Most of the time, anyway.

“How’d you find out?” Jack asked, fiddling with his hands again. “You wouldn’t have gone looking without a reason.”

Embarrassed, Brock looked away. “Rogers opened his big mouth, I looked at your file and saw myself as your next of kin instead of Mickey. Then I hacked the IRS and pulled up your tax return. Our tax return.”

“I’m a little surprised that for five years you never bothered to ask why I was doing both of our taxes.”

“You’re the second in command, it’s your job to handle all of the paperwork.”

Jack just smirked into his glass as he took another sip of his whiskey.

“Wait, 1998? _ How _ did we get married? I’m no history buff, but I’m pretty sure that was illegal.”

Face falling, Jack was quiet for several seconds before he gave Brock a sad, bitter smile. “Hail fucking HYDRA.”

“Fuckin’ _ hell.” _ Moose complained as Brock leaned over him to grab his drink from the coffee table and took a larger sip than he might have otherwise. “You’re telling me we sold ourselves to the fucking Nazis so we could-”

“Yep. Or at least, you did. They got me when Mickey’s unit got ambushed in the desert and the Marines decided they were an acceptable loss.”

Brock swore again and tilted his head back to look up at the ceiling. “I guess that’s one way to pay off the preacher.”

“I think we paid the clerk enough to send both of her kids to college.”

“Well at least there’s that. Nice to know _ something _ good came out of the whole mess.”

“Fury knew within days,” Jack continued. “Although I shouldn’t’ve been surprised about that. He pulled us aside and made it abundantly clear that he was making an exception for one reason and one only.”

“Hm?”

He smirked slightly. “We were the only two agents in the whole of SHIELD that he didn’t want to take the risk of pissin’ off.”

Brock snorted and let more of the whiskey burn its way across his tongue. “Well, you _ are _ the Bloodhound.”

“Woof.”

Another question popped up into Brock’s head, and he was asking it before he could stop himself. “How in the hell were you okay with me dating?”

“I wasn’t.” Jack’s jaw tightened a little. “Still not, but it’s not like I’ve had much of a claim on you. Speaking of which-”

And whatever levity they’d had evaporated in an instant. “Yeah. I… need to talk to Christine.”

Jack hesitated, then nodded. “Look, I- I’m not going to force you to, I dunno, break up with her or somethin’, but…”

“I’m not gonna make any assumptions about anyone’s next steps until I get a chance to talk this through with her.” Brock was hoping that her usual level-headedness would win out with this one.

Nodding again, Jack finished the last of his whiskey. “For what it’s worth, I like her better than the last guy.”

The fact that most of Brock’s exes had thought Jack was aloof, cold, or antisocial made so much more sense, now.

Brock was already starting to dread that conversation; Christine was the only partner he’d had since Libya that had lasted more than a few months. He had no hesitations about dropping a partner without warning if they were headed for a long deployment, but something gave him pause about breaking her heart like this.

“I should…”

“Yeah.” Jack chewed on his lip. “While I’d be happy to offer you the couch, I think that might make things more awkward.”

It wasn’t until Brock was lacing up his boots that Jack spoke again, still sitting on the couch with his fingers laced together.

_ “In bocca al lupo,” _he murmured, the Italian rolling easily off his tongue. Good luck.

Brock swallowed and gave Cricket one last stroke, then stood. _ “Crepi il lupo… _ Thanks. I’ll… call you in the morning. Or something.” And with that, he let himself out and headed for the taxi waiting at the curb.

Jack wasn’t any stranger to insomnia, and he busied himself with tidying up the loft until he was finally tired enough to justify getting into bed. Even then, he stared at the wall for nearly an hour before admitting defeat and heading back downstairs to play mindless video games. He didn’t have to report in tomorrow, so he could afford to fuck up his sleep cycle for a day or two.

He definitely wasn’t expecting someone to start pounding on his door at ass o’clock in the morning.

The SIG pistol stayed hidden behind the door as he opened it, but Jack could easily have made the shot through the wood if needed, especially at this close range.

Brock stood on the other side, eyes trained on the exact spot Jack held his gun even though he couldn’t see it. His hands were empty and loose at his sides, easily visible. “Can I come in?”

“You got a tail?”

“Possibly.”

Jack quickly scanned the street behind him, then grabbed Brock’s collar and hauled him inside. “Lucky, secure the-”

_ “On it, boss,” _ a distinctively Irish voice answered him. _ “Perimeter secure.” _

“You have your own AI?” Brock muttered, confused.

“Later. What the fuck is going on?”

Brock leaned heavily against the wall in the entryway. “Christine is one of Pierce’s. She’s a honeypot. We need to get the hell outta Dodge.”

“How do you know?” Jack asked, eyes narrowing. Not that he didn’t trust Brock, but that was a heavy accusation to make.

“She slipped up and called me Brock when she begged me not to leave her.” And there it was: Brock always used his middle name and his mother’s maiden name when dating. “Turns out Pierce was keeping eyes on us. HYDRA got tired of the power couple, wanted to make sure we’d stay split up.”

Jack stood there dumbly, gun hanging loose in his hand, staring at Brock.

“Well? Say something.”

He swallowed, took a breath, then closed his eyes. “Lucky, let Mickey know we’re gonna be out of town for a bit. Paperwork for the house and car is in the gun safe if he needs it. He knows the combination.”

_ “Copy, boss.” _

Jack handed the SIG to Brock and headed for the hall closet; he pulled out a large backpack, two motorcycle jackets, and two helmets before looking back up at Brock. “Do you trust me?”

“Yes.” Brock didn’t even have to think about it.

“My uncle has a cabin in the Adirondacks. It’s unregistered, off the grid, and has a security system to rival Stark’s.”

“How do you expect to get us to New York undetected?”

In answer, Jack handed him one of two photostatic veils he pulled out of the closet. “Don’t ask why I have this, put it on, and let’s move.”

Two hours in, Brock’s ass went numb.

Four hours in, Jack lied disturbingly smoothly to get them out of a pedantic speeding ticket.

Seven hours in, Brock’s goddamn _ dick _ went numb. Though that might have been a blessing, all things considered.

A little over eight hours later, the bike finally rumbled to a stop at the end of a long, winding driveway. Jack exhaled and tipped his head forward, muscles shaking slightly from the fatigue of riding for so long.

Once Brock peeled himself off the bike and staggered some circulation back into his legs, Jack waddled the thing into the small garage attached to a cozy-looking cabin.

“Shit, Jack,” Brock groaned when he saw the empty space in the garage, just the right size for the car Jack had bought as a teenager and kept ever since. “Your El Camino…”

“We’re gonna get declared legally dead once HYDRA finds the right sized bodies to fake it with,” Jack told him flatly as he unbuckled the strap on his helmet. “In which case, everything gets willed to Mickey. He’ll be fine. The truck will be fine. The cats will be fine...” He said the last bit as more of a reassurance to himself than anything else.

They restored power just in time for the sun to peek over the trees surrounding the house and start warming up the solar panels. Within minutes, Jack was leaning on the counter next to the stove as the kettle heated up for tea, eyes half-open and shoulders rounded.

Brock sank into a chair at the kitchen table with a quiet groan and put his head on his arms. Once the kettle boiled, Jack made them both cups of tea and set Brock’s next to his arm.

Sitting up, Brock wrapped his hands around the garish Disneyland mug. “Thank you,” he murmured, and from the soft look and nod that Jack gave him, he understood that it was for more than just the tea.

“So,” Jack finally said once he was halfway through his cup, “where do we go from here?”

“Food, clothing, shelter,” Brock answered, tapping the table with three fingers in sequence.

“There’s a garden plot out back that we can revive, but for now we’ll have to drive into town for groceries. It’s about a half hour each way.” Looking down at his tea with puffy eyes, Jack yawned. “Clothing, we probably have enough spares here as long as the moths didn’t get into the boxes. Backpack has IDs, weapons, cash, and burner phones. We’ll have to pick up a propane tank in town, I think the one we’ve got right now is a little low. Heating is from the stove over there, I’ll chop some wood later today. Water should be good to go.”

“Hot water?”

“Point-of-use heaters. Battery backup system’ll take a day or so to charge, but until then, if we have sunlight, we have hot water.”

Brock groaned a little at the thought of a hot shower. “Please tell me you have decent water pressure here.”

“That we do. You saw to that after the first time we stayed up here.”

It was meant to be a joke, but Brock couldn’t bring himself to laugh at it. “I’m sorry I don’t remember.”

“Brock…”

“God, we had a whole _ life _ together.”

Jack didn’t answer, but the shadows around his eyes deepened.

“I’m sorry,” Brock choked out, tears in his eyes starting to blur the table in front of him.

Jack’s chair scraped against the floor as he moved closer, and his arm wrapped around Brock’s shoulders to pull him into a hug. Brock couldn’t help but cling to him a bit; his best friend, his most trustworthy soldier, the man Brock could always count on to both follow orders and call him on his bullshit.

His husband.

Through the thin fabric of Jack’s shirt, Brock closed his hand over dog tags and rings. “I dunno if I’m ready to wear this again yet…”

“That’s fine,” Jack said, his voice more a rumble against Brock’s cheek than anything else.

“...but I want to try. I want to remember.” And right now, a faded past that he was reliving through someone else’s memories was all he had left.

Jack’s chest expanded and contracted as he breathed, his heartbeat steady and slow. “We won’t- and shouldn’t- go from zero to a hundred, Brock. It’s gonna take time for you to work through this, and time to get over Christine-”

Brock bristled at the name, and a rush of anger blazed through him. “Fuck her, man. _ Fuck _her.” He deflated just as quickly though, the fiery energy fading and leaving him feeling drained in its absence.

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry it ended that way,” Jack murmured, and wrapped his arms a bit tighter. “That aside, it’s also gonna take me some time to get used to havin’ you back.”

Closing his eyes, Brock nodded. “Either way, we’ll have to disappear completely. It’s a good thing your family ain’t in your personnel file or they’d be able to track this place down through your uncle.”

“Little hard to hide the scar on my face.”

“Good,” Brock said. “Because I like it.”

“You like the leftovers from when the Asset damn near sliced my face off?”

“I like the evidence that you survived it.”

Jack huffed out a fond laugh and pulled away a little, putting his hand on the side of Brock’s neck and stroking his thumb over the corner of his jaw. “You’re weird.”

Somehow managing a smirk despite the fatigue and gritty, aching eyes, Brock raised an eyebrow. “And you still married me.”

“Mm. That I did.” Jack’s expression relaxed into something softer and happier than Brock had seen on him in a very long time, then it grew more serious. “There’s something really important, though, and for lack of a better way to say it, it’s a matter of opsec.”

Brock’s blood ran cold. Was the security system down? Had they been followed and he hadn’t noticed?

In that same serious tone, Jack looked Brock dead in the eye and said, “We’re gonna need to cut your hair.”

He stared at Jack dumbly for a few seconds. “What?”

Long fingers reached up to smooth back what must have been a terrible case of helmet hair, not that Jack’s own was doing any better. “Seriously, the fluffy faux hawk, as much as it’s adorable-”

“I am _ not _ adora-”

“-it’s also one of the first things they’re gonna put on your BOLO.”

And as much as Brock grimaced at the thought of taking clippers to his hair… Jack was right. He usually was. “Fine. But you’re wearing a PV mask every time we have to leave the house. We both know how good Insight’s targeting systems are.”

The corner of Jack’s mouth quirked up in a smile. “Deal. And look on the bright side, we probably won’t need to get rid of all of it. Can always just give you an undercut, let the rest grow out, put it in a man bun-”

“Rollins, I swear to god, stop talking about my goddamn hair or I am going to make you _ eat _ what you cut off.” Brock rolled his eyes when Jack snickered, and put his cold hands back around his not-as-cold cup of tea. “What’re you gonna do, stop gelling it back?”

Jack shrugged and picked up his own mug again. “Not sure, yet. If I’m in a PV mask every time we’re out, it’ll be less important.”

“You’ll have to walk different.”

Raising an eyebrow, Jack took a sip of his tea. “You do realize that I’m the one that trains- _ trained _ most of our undercover operators?”

Oddly enough, the thought of their careers both being in the past tense stung less than Brock thought it would. “Yeah, yeah. So, Master of Disguise, what do we have for breakfast around here?”

“Couple’a boxes of .44 Magnum, a Ka-Bar or two, some wood shavings in the stove… oh, and I think I saw a canister of Quaker Oats somewhere in the cupboard. Probably about a decade old, though. D’you think those actually go bad on the expiration date?”

“You brought the Desert Eagle but you didn’t bring rations.”

“I brought the Desert Eagle _ so _ I can shoot us some rations.”

Brock groaned and thumped his forehead against the table. “And this is why you were never quartermaster.”

“Because I know how to forage?”

“You can’t eat guns, Jack.”

“You can eat what you _ shoot _ with the guns.”

_ “Jack.” _

“Okay, okay, fine. There’s a few bars of USCG Lemon Surprise in the backpack. I think they’re still good but you might want to check the expiration date. Those _ do _ go bad. You don’t wanna know how I know that.”

Brock couldn’t completely stifle his shudder, earning another laugh out of Jack. “You win, go shoot something with that boom stick of yours.”

“Nah, I got a longbow for that in the garage. Less messy. Quieter, too.”

Getting up to rinse out his cup, Brock rolled his eyes. “Okay, Barton. Still, though, we need calories, and we probably shouldn’t show up on any cameras for the next seventy-two.”

“Copy that.” Jack joined him at the sink and swirled some water around to slosh the dregs of his tea leaves down the drain. “You can have first crack at the shower. I should wait until I’ve cleaned whatever game I manage to bag.”

“Come back safe.” It was automatic after so many years working together, and Brock never even realized he’d said it half the time until he had; it had become an instinctive response to Jack going off into any sort of danger.

He got another one of those soft smiles, then Jack leaned in and gently brushed their lips together. “Always do,” he murmured, then set his mug in the sink and headed for the door to the garage.

It took Brock until well after Jack disappeared into the forest to do much more than blink, but when he turned to the sink and grabbed the sponge to wash their mugs, he was smiling.

**Author's Note:**

> In bocca al lupo: (italian) idiom meaning "Good luck." Literally: into the wolf's mouth.  
Crepi il lupo: (italian) the usual response to "in bocca al lupo." Literally: may the wolf die.
> 
> Comes from theater and opera. I guess it's their version of "break a leg."
> 
> Other notes:  
\- Christine is not Christine Everhart. Different characters.  
\- USCG Lemon Surprise is what I learned to call United States Coast Guard Emergency Rations, Lemon Flavor. Because they really, don't taste like lemons, and somehow it's always surprising. They'll keep you alive in a pinch, though.


End file.
